BRUSSELS — With more than a million migrants having reached Europe in the last year and many more on the way, NATO stepped into the crisis for the first time on Thursday, saying it would deploy ships to the Aegean Sea in an attempt to stop smugglers.

While the world clearly has the political will and legal tools to take on human traffickers and their criminal networks, what are needed is more meaningful international cooperation and adequate funding to take effective action, senior United Nations officials said today, warning that the scourge now has victims spread across 152 different citizenships in 124 countries.

Open Democracy's Beyond Trafficking and Slavery project have developed a short open access ‘e-syllabus’ on forced labour, trafficking, and slavery drawing on their publications from the past 18 months. An eight volume set of materials has been developed and is free to download. A goal of this endeavour is 'reaching not only practitioners and students in the global north, but to also reach readers working in organisations and institutions unable to pay for expensive academic journal and subscription services'